A Happy New Year Experience

I’m a huge fan of Japanese food. I must confess I also enjoy a whisky highball or three, especially on a special occasion. With this in mind, myself and my fiancé decided to make Don-Don our NYE restaurant of choice.

The first thing that struck us as we walked into Don-Don was the atmosphere. The place was buzzing pleasantly with a mixture of families, friends, and couples. We were promptly seated with a menu and told by the attentive staff that a table would be ready in 5 minutes.

We ordered right away, both opting for sets from the main menu. I went for the Beef, and my fiancé the Shabu-Shabu. Both meals came with rice, miso soup, pickled vegetables and, bizarrely, pasta. These side dishes were very welcome (pasta aside), but didn’t distract from the stars of the show.

Korea is approximately 96% ethnically homogeneous, but also serves as one of several central business and international relation hubs for all of Asia. Similar to large cities in the USA, Seoul also has different ethnic enclaves with authentic foods, residential housing and services dedicated to their respective nationalities.

Here’s a short description of where to find these ethnic enclaves and some things you can find there:

A thought struck me as I was taking a shower before work this morning. With the renewal of tension along the North-South Korean border it’s a sharp reminder of the results of history, and what we’re looking at here, could be considered as one of the final plays in the game of the Great Powers. It, like so many skirmishes before, is taking place in a distant field which effects the lives of people so far away they don’t even look real. Well as one of these people I can assure you that it’s quite real.

Since Korea opened up to outside influence in the late nineteenth century, much like many other small kingdoms, was turned into a pawn in the chessboard of empire building. This process set Korea up to be misused and abused by forces outside their control, and today we are experiencing the continued results of this.

Exceptional sushi in Busan is easy to come by. I cannot count the number of rolls and pieces of raw fish that I have enjoyed here. For me, living somewhere completely landlocked, sushi was something that was terribly expensive and only good half the time. I have been lucky in Busan to find a place that does rolls for a decent price that are truly heavenly.

Recently I was able to attend a Lolita meetup here in Seoul after meeting some very kind Korean Lolitas through the EGL livejournal! They have these meetups a little randomly, so unless you are a lurker of the Korean Lolita Naver cafe, they are easy to miss!

Yesterday I came down with what was probably Swine Flu and shortly began thinking and speaking almost entirely in Korean, which did not help me a great deal when I happened to find myself listening to the pronouncements of a Korean doctor late that afternoon, hiding my gaping mouth (through which I was gasping, slack-jawed, like an inbred country boy) behind a hospital-provided medical mask; lucky for me this doctor spoke flawless English, which she revealed by translating my high temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit without being asked. I was running a fever of about a hundred and one.

A new vocabulary is gradually being learned, a vocabulary of crisis. A very particular crisis. The tsunami and earthquake in Japan shattered the reactors of the Fukishima-Daichi nuclear power plant north of Tokyo on the country’s east coast. If you haven’t heard about this then perhaps you should change the channel on the television or read a different newspaper. With the damage to the plant came a universal threat to everyone, especially those closest to the power plant. Radiation, a slow and silent killer, has been seeping into the air and Pacific Ocean.

The fire at the Fukishima Daichi nuclear power plant which is contributing to the radiation leakage